Watchmen Weekend: When Bloggers Become Superheroes

Posted on March 5, 2009

As part of our Watchmen Special (one more day till the we watch the movie and counting!) we decided to answer once and for all the question that is on everyone’s minds (we know you spend a lot of time thinking about this…) : what would happen if your favorite blogger became a super-hero?

So, we contacted a few people and posed the following question:

“You’ve had enough of all the villainy around. You decide to take a stance as a Vigilante. You do not have a super-power, but to make things more interesting you are a rich person. What would you call yourself and how would you go about serving justice? What kind of vigilante would you be: the kind that turns the villains over to the police (i.e. Batman) or the kind that tortures or kills those that you apprehend (i.e. Rorschach from the Watchmen)?”

I ran this question by my husband Mark, boyhood comic fanatic and proud owner of FOURTEEN giant boxes of comic books. I asked if, in his boyhood he ever fantasized about such a thing as being rich and going into crime fighting, but without superpowers. He was like, NO WAY, no boy ever imagines being rich and having NO powers. All you care about is the powers. Upon some prodding, though, he thought it might be cool to build an underground system of dungeons equipped with holographic technology and the holographs trick the criminals into giving up lots of information, and you would also imprison them there, because letting criminals into the current pathetic system would not be the way of DUNGEONMOGUL.

Carolyn Jean

Okay, you know how in Dickens’s Christmas Carol, the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future make Scrooge feel sorry for how he has acted? My vigilante would do that, but with, oh, a harsher twist. Did you shoot somebody? With my special immobilization poison, I would render you totally helpless, but you can still see and hear, and I will place you in a Plexiglas box in your victim’s house so you could see how much pain you put them in, and you have to hear them complaining but you can do nothing about it. Did you pollute a river? I’ll make you see all the animals you killed, maybe even make you watch some of them die, and possibly make you drink the poisoned water, or maybe I’ll even use DUNGEONMOGUL’S facilities (because we’re married therefore a DUO) to see the future horrors you created. Or, say you an evil world leader/despot who has wrongfully attacked another country? I am going to immobilize and place you in a bombed out city with kids with their limbs blown off and people whose lives you destroyed, and I will leave you there for days so that you see what you’ve done. I do not need prisons or torture because I want my victims to torture themselves!! Because I am SORRYMAKER.

I was born into privilege. I have the best of everything. But my father was a former Army general and made sure I wasn’t too spoiled. He taught me the importance of discipline and made sure I could defend myself. I am daddy’s little girl because my mother died in labor while giving birth to me.

I have an IQ that is through the roof, but downplay my intelligence. I pull off the dumb blond act really well. Only my father knows what I am capable of. I also have quite the skill at writing and by the time I was twenty-one I published my first etiquette book. I am a freelance writer and have my own popular gossip columnists at one of the biggest and best newspapers in the city.

But my city has fallen into chaos and the police and government officials are being bribed from a very powerful madman who hides in the darkness. No one knows who he is or has ever seen hi face. I have decided to take on this evildoer and his band of criminals. My father doesn’t have any idea that I have become a vigilante of justice. At night I dress all in black and wear a red wig. I use tranquilizers as my weapons. One prick and I can paralyze a person. My black belt in karate and my self- defense moves make me unstoppable. I won’t give up until I unmask the man who has become my enemy.

I am known as the Babbinator for the long babbling messages I write and send to the newspapers where I mock the criminals.

Most people wake up wondering how quick they can coax the percolator to spew the coffee. With my job, I’m always waking up looking for the next big sale.

I stagger from my full-sized bed and down the murky hallway to a devilishly cheerful kitchen. Trust me, yellow trimmed in brown flowers is overrated. Some days the seventies reverb is astounding. Still, I can’t spare the cash for a remodel and the landlord hates impromptu design-on-a-dime anyway. I sink into a retro diner chair and pick up the local paper that’d been delivered as I made my way to bed this morning. A few scanned pages and I know where I’m headed as soon as I get around to schlepping last night’s, or should I say early morning’s, coffee dregs. Wal-Mart’s priced it as low as it can go – and I need some new towels. I’ll find a way to stay out of Home Décor.

Being a superhero doesn’t leave much room for sleep and I’ve gotten quite good at fooling my body into thinking it’d gotten a full eight. I lurch, er, move across to the single, long counter and swipe a mug of the mug tree, avoid the sugar and proceed to pour a cold cup. It’s a testament to my strength of will that I neither wince nor choke.

See, there’s this new vigilante in town – my town – and he’ not looking to help. The police are knocking on my door day and night, the phone’s shouting for a pick up. With three lifeless bodies so far, who can blame them? I aim to keep that count from climbing any higher.

But this bastard, he’s fighting dirty and no villain deserves the softest, plushest towel life has to offer. It’s the nubby towel for him; the kind dodgy hotels stock like the Easter Bunny hoards candy for kids. I grip my mug a bit tighter as I sip it all in, both the bitter coffee and the scene that’ll play out later today. Captain Kill, as the papers were now calling him, is going to learn what vengeance feels like when my sandpaper grade towel coils his neck, the thick, sewn corner whipping around to bite his cheek. He’s going down.

And I smile.

*Because a towel is the most useful item in the whole universe as we all know…

Since I turn green at the sight of most physical injuries, there’s no way I could ever serve justice Rorschach-style. Even if I had a henchman to do it for me, I’d still wince if present and get a reputation as the supreme wuss of the vigilantes. Then villains would laugh at me so torturing and killing is definitely out of the question.

Psychological torture would be far more interesting anyway. Since I’m filthy rich, I’d find and hire charismatic actors to befriend the fiends I decide need to be taught a lesson. These employees would acquaint themselves with the villain, then find out all their deepest secrets and worst fears. This could take a while, but the wait would be worth it because when they least expect it, I’ll use everything I know against them. Kind of like the Mafia meets the CIA, only without Oliver Stone.

But psychological terror doesn’t have to mean Stephen King on a bad day, there can be a level of everyday torture that’s just as fun. My contacts and hired hackers would make sure villains could never get a loan for a new car or outfit their luxury yacht/secret headquarters with their credit cards. In between identity thefts my hackers would spend their time writing new, targeted viruses that corrupt files and crash systems. No villain in the city could park for more than ten minutes without my friends in the police department leaving a ticket on their windshield, and if they stayed for an hour they’d get the boot. And of course, they’d be signed up for every bad magazine and spam mailing list the second they even thought about committing a crime.

Though many of my actions would not garner attention, among those who knew what I was doing I’d be known as Atropos. My foes would just call me “that biotch!”

Profile: Cyberwitch is a technical wizard who specializes in disrupting enemy communications. Terrorist plans get hacked and disrupted. Rogue regimes suffers communications breakdowns. Highly coordinated attacks are discoordinated. And even more insidiously, she infiltrates such groups with cyber-identities and causes chaos from within.

She doesn’t kill her enemies or even turn them over to the police. Instead, Cyberwitch makes it impossible for them to fulfill their sinister objectives.

Since she is super-rich, she has access to all the latest technology, both legal and illegal, and both human and alien. She operates offshore on a luxury yacht crammed full of all the latest innovations and satellite communication dishes. For exercise, she swims laps around the boat and occasionally evades sharks. She keeps her fingers in fighting form by playing a wicked piano.

Symbol: stylized witch’s broom that looks like it was made from elements of a circuit board

The problem is that I’m not really Vigilante material – if I were a rich person, I probably wouldn’t care much about villainy because I’d be too busy building my dreamhouse /creating a giant library/buying and reading books etc., and even if not, a Vigilante who doesn’t know how to fight and is secretly afraid that there are monsters hiding in the dark is pretty much a hopeless case. 🙂 If I were to create a Vigilante character, however, I’d name her Vengeance, and her way of treating villains would be the way those villains treat their victims, just to put an emphasis on the saying ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’. Also, she’d probably turn out to be just a spoiled rich girl who has a very limited understanding of who the actual villain is – and I’d make her of Russian origin, so she’d be able to make ‘In Soviet Russia …’ jokes all the time. ^^

And of course there’s also Thea and Ana who together form this fantastic duo that are ….are you ready for this?
THE BOOK SMUGGLERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*Ana and Thea duck flying objects*

No wait, we are not cheating. For starters the Book Smugglers is a fantastic title for a super-hero duo.( Ok, we may be a little bit biased here but bear with us). Then, we already have the costumes (*Ana and Thea point to blog header*) minus the high heels because we can’t fight crime in them, obviously. And no one can deny that saving books is a worthy cause! Because you see, we wouldn’t simply be smuggling books into our houses. Nooooooooo. Because we would be filthy rich, we would build a time machine and then we would go back in time and we would stop all the Book-burning that has ever happened in History! We could save the Library of Alexandria from burning to the ground! We could find any book to have ever been lost – works of poets, philosophers, doctors. We could find out who wrote the Bible! We could stop crimes AGAINST LITERATURE FROM OCURRING. WE CAN MAKE MARGARET MITCHELL –REWRITE THE END OF GONE WITH THE END AND HAVE RHETT STAY WITH SCARLET MUWAHAHAHAHA. Oh the power! The power!
WE CAN. NO.

That’s too much power. Maybe we ought to pass. You know, diminish and remain Ana and Thea. We could use the money to build a HQ – an installation for all the other vigilantes to congregate and train! We could be A and T!

So there you have it: 8 vigilantes with various ways to fight crime (it’s ok Trin, you can sit back at the HQ with Thea and Ana and come up with hilarious jokes for our down time!)

Now all we need to come up with a good name for the group. Will you help? We think that The Amazing Book Bloggers That Fight Against Crime And Assorted Villains (or T.A.B.B.T.F.A.C.A.A.V.) is too long!

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Ana Grilo is a Brazilian who moved to the UK because of the weather. No, seriously. She works with translations in RL and hopes one day The Book Smugglers will be her day job. When she’s not here at The Book Smugglers, she is hogging our Twitter feed.

Tracy

lol I enjoyed reading this! As for a name, I can’t really think of one. I’m sort of bad when it comes to naming things. The only thing I could think of is “Octilantes”, incorporating the number of you all and that you’re vigilantes.

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The Book Smugglers

noun
1 : a book review blog specializing in speculative fiction and popgeekery for all ages since 2008.
2 : a publisher of speculative short fiction and nonfiction since 2014.
3 : 2018 Hugo Nominee for Best Semiprozine
4 : a duo of awesomely badass book nerds

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